Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (42 page)

If there was any uncertainty about the size of the invading army, there was no doubt among either the Persians or the Greeks regarding the route the invasion would have to take. Xerxes’s path toward south and central mainland Greece—and toward the cities of Sparta and Athens that had so gallingly defied him—would force him along a narrow pass bounded by steep mountainsides to the south and by the sea to the north. At its three narrowest points the roadway was barely wide enough to let two wagons pass one another. These pinch points were the “gates,” and since there were naturally occurring hot springs nearby, they were known locally as the “hot gates”—in Greek,
Thermopylae
.

It was to the middle of the three gates that King Leonidas, tasked with holding back the might of Persia, had brought his much smaller army. Here the cliffs were steepest and closest by the road; here the bottleneck created by geology was his strongest ally.

By the time Xerxes’s force arrived at the gates his navy was also in position in Cape Sepias, to the north. The Greek ships were lying in wait for them at Artemisium, a harbor at the north-western end of the island of Euboea, in the Malian Gulf. The subsequent naval engagement would be crucial too. Without being challenged, the Persian navy might have been able to land an outflanking force on land toward the Spartan rear. The stage was set.

During the month of August, the pass of Thermopylae can be a hard place to be at the best of times. The temperatures rise well into the 90’s Fahrenheit and flies and other biting insects add to the discomfort. For several days of that August of 480
BC
Xerxes held his horde at the ready, but made no move.

When tens of thousands of people stay in the same place for even a handful of days, they add to their own discomforts with every passing hour. The sun beat down by day, heating the rock and the earth so that the nights brought little relief. Worse than any heat of sun or land though, or the reek of massed humanity, was
the pressure of waiting. For the Persian force as well as for the defenders that time of waiting must have drawn out with the grating rasp of sword blade against sheath. Thermopylae can be a hard place to be at the best of times, and these were not the best of times.

The force commanded by Leonidas was perhaps 4,000 strong. It comprised soldiers from several parts of mainland Greece, including Thespes and Thebes, as well as around 1,000 helots. Elite among all of these fighting men, however, were 300 Spartan hoplites, hand-picked for the job by Leonidas himself. These were the best of the best—the few—but that this was a suicide squad ready and expecting to die is revealed by the king’s order that only the fathers of sons could make up this contingent. Such a condition ensured that the men’s family lines would be able to continue after their death—and it was guaranteed that boys left fatherless by such a battle would be hungriest of all among their peers for their own chance to live up to such deaths.

How can we imagine what was said between husbands and wives, parents and children, as the soldiers made ready to leave their homes and families for ever? Had their upbringing really been enough to make it easy for those goodbyes to be said? Was the faith of every man and woman, son and daughter, strong enough to make those partings happy? Herodotus wrote that when Gorgo asked Leonidas what she should do when he was gone, he told her to marry a good man and have strong children.

Everyone in Greece knew the quality of the Spartan hoplite. He was the best trained, best equipped and best motivated of any fighting men in the known world. He wore his hair very long, clearly visible down his back beneath a helmet fashioned from a single sheet of bronze and topped with a horsehair crest. It afforded fine protection from blows aimed with sword or spear but made it hard to see and hear. Hoplites fought shoulder to shoulder with their
comrades in the phalanx for the simple reason that to lose physical contact with the man on either side was to cease to be a functioning part of this otherwise unstoppable fighting machine. On his chest and back he wore a molded sheet of bronze armor over a tunic of red wool. His lower legs were shielded by lightweight greaves, like shin pads, and he was barefoot—the soles of his feet toughened to leather by a lifetime spent running and marching over rock and thorn. On his left arm he carried a large, circular wooden shield faced with a thin sheet of bronze. Held in front and overlapping the shields of the hoplites on either side, it meant that a disciplined advance by such a phalanx presented its opponents with an impenetrable wall moving inexorably forward. He was armed with a short stabbing sword or, better yet, a spear.

While the stand-off continued, Xerxes ordered one of his men to approach the Greeks and see what they were doing. The spy returned to say they were practicing gymnastics completely naked or combing their long hair! Xerxes laughed out loud at the news—this would surely be a walkover!

But Demaratus, once a Spartan king, now dispossessed and in the pay of the Persians as an adviser, put his master straight. In the first place, he said, “Spartans are the equal of any man when they fight as individuals; fighting together…they surpass all other men.”

But this detail about the hair, he said, was the blackest news the spy could have brought back. Hoplites prepared this way only when they had decided they would never be going home, would never stop and never surrender. This was the final preparation for a deliberate fight to the death. Only death would end the day for the Spartans.

Undeterred, Xerxes sent emissaries to say this was the last chance to submit to Persia without a fight. Leonidas curtly dismissed them, and an enraged Xerxes delivered his final word—that the Spartans
should hand over their weapons now while there was still time.

Leonidas’s reply has gone down in history—to be repeated many times since by commanders given similar threats:

“Come and get them,” he said.

Xerxes unleashed a frontal attack by thousands of infantrymen—those taken into the Persian Army from conquered or otherwise submissive states. These “medes” were far from his best men, but surely force of numbers would carry the day? More lightly armed than their opponents, they charged, howling, into the narrow space left by crowding mountain and sea—and in such a place, where perhaps only a dozen could pass at a time, their numbers counted against them. As they crowded into the narrows and emerged in handfuls on to the far side of the “gate,” the waiting Spartans cut them down like grass.

There is a spur worn by men fighting to defend their homes, fighting in the defense of family and of a way of life that is missing from the armor of invaders. Those Spartans, outnumbered though they were, had nowhere to run to even if they wished to flee—and they did not. The rock and dust beneath their bare feet was where they belonged. Added to this was the technical superiority that comes from lifelong training and experience as a fighting unit. Fighting as one, as Demaratus had warned Xerxes they would, the hoplite infantry were capable of deploying tactics with a finesse that was beyond the wit of conscripts. In later centuries, Roman legions would make their advance irresistible by deploying their front-line fighting men in relays. A legionnaire would spend no more than 15 minutes at the front before being replaced by a fresh man. Pulled to the back and given time to get his breath back, he could fight all day if need be. This ploy was known to the Spartans first, and meant that though their total force at Thermopylae was small, its muscles and lungs were constantly being renewed as though by extra forces. More impressive still, the instinctive command of
drill meant whole companies of hoplite infantry were able to feign withdrawals, pulling pockets of the enemy into reckless pursuit, before wheeling about on command and cutting down their would-be tormentors.

Hour after hour it went on, until it was said the ground beneath the soldiers’ feet became slick with spilt blood, the air heavy with its metallic stink. Frustrated by the inability of the medes to make any headway, Xerxes reinforced them with waves of his crack troops—a 10,000-strong royal bodyguard known as the “Immortals”. It was believed by enemies of the Persian Empire that as one fell he was instantly replaced by another waiting in the wings—and so the Immortals’ number could never be worn down. History would show there were only 300 Immortals at Thermopylae and none of them were Persian.

Dusk was making inroads on the full light of day and still the Greeks held the pass. Finally the heaps of Persian slain blocking the gates—so-called Immortals plentiful among them—became an impossible hindrance to any hope of victory that first day. The invaders were forced to withdraw.

Now there was the blood and gore of dead Persians to be combed from the hair of the hoplites, waiting in the sudden silence of this space between life and death.

Wounded but still mighty, the Persian host rose like the dawn on the morning of the second day. Immortals and medes alike were flung at the gates by the King of Kings, impatient for a final victory he knew must soon be his. But still the invaders had to endure killing and dying by the hundreds and by the thousands while the disciplined, better-armored hoplites shrugged off the torrent, falling only in ones and twos.

It is now that one of those tantalizing “what ifs” of history arises. If the narrow gates of Thermopylae had remained the only entrance for the Persians, might they eventually have lost their appetite for
the fight in this place now reeking with the corruption of their bloated and fly-blown dead? Perhaps, given another roll of the dice, victory might have come not to Xerxes, but to Leonidas.

As it was, fate was to place a traitor on the stage in the form of a local Greek farmer called Ephialtes. It was he who told the Persians about another way toward the cities of Athens and Sparta—a way that bypassed the lowland narrows of Thermopylae. Brought before Xerxes, he promptly divulged the details of a route up into the mountains that would offer easy passage even for armed men.

As the second day of the battle came to an end—still without any breach in the Spartan defense—a force of Immortals was dispatched into the mountains to find the high road. Some say word of the betrayal reached Leonidas and that his response was to send an assassin charged with killing Xerxes himself. True or false, Xerxes was not killed that night and by morning his Immortals had overcome the Greek force stationed on the high road. They were now behind the Spartans and traveling quickly toward them. Perhaps this was the single failure of Leonidas—proof that he was human after all: that he knew that high road was his Achilles heel and yet he placed only a small guard there that was too easily overcome.

When word reached the Spartan king that he was outflanked, he ordered the bulk of his army to withdraw while there was still time—the better to fight another day. Maybe this is wishful thinking—maybe many Greek soldiers simply saw the game was up and took themselves away to safety rather than face the inevitable. But even that possibility takes nothing away from Leonidas, his 300 and the few hundred other Thespians and native Greeks who remained to fight in the jaws of death.

Over breakfast that morning of the third day, Leonidas coolly informed his comrades that they would take their next meal in Hell. In hope of goading the defenders, Persian emissaries approached the gates to say that bowmen would be joining the fray—so many,
their arrow shafts would blot out the sun and turn day to night.

“Good news,” said the Spartan Dieneces, in true laconic style. “At least we’ll be fighting in the shade!”

And the arrows flew and swords swung and spears were thrust and men fell. The defenders fought with impossible will and the invaders were dying faster even than before. Perhaps for those Spartans there was a freedom in those last hours and minutes, the freedom of death foretold. Before coming to Thermopylae they had consulted the oracle at Delphi and it had told that either Sparta would fall or one of her kings would die. Death then—even the death of Leonidas himself—was the price that had to be paid if Sparta was to remain free. In any case the king and his men fought with a savage recklessness and the enemy dead were piled high around them. Finally, surrounded by uncountable numbers of the enemy, Leonidas and his comrades fought their way toward a small hill overlooking the gates and the sea.

It was here in this moment that the king was cut down, and now the remaining few fought desperately to keep his body from the enemy. Their efforts were in vain, and Leonidas’s corpse was dragged away by the invaders. Later, in a fit of rage at the price he had been made to pay for passage through the hot gates, Xerxes ordered its crucifixion. In a final act of desecration, the head was cut off and impaled on a stake for all to see.

And there on the slopes and summit of that hill the Spartan few found their finest hour. All shields and weapons broken, they threw themselves at the enemy armed only with hands and teeth. Grappling, gouging and biting for the throats of the foe, they died to the last man. Even at the end the Persians could find neither the courage nor the strength to break these last men face-to-face. Instead it was their archers, keeping a safe distance and unleashing storm after storm of arrows on to Persian and Spartan alike, that finally brought the matter to a close.

So Xerxes and his Persians passed through Thermopylae. Their stay in Greece, however, was brief and unhappy. The Spartan stand at those gates and the death there of Leonidas poured steel into the backbones of those Greeks now facing the invader. There were no Athenians at Thermopylae—but there were many on the ships at Artimisium. Their bravery in the face of the Persian navy—aided and abetted by winds unfavorable to the foe—brought a victory of sorts. Dispersed, their morale broken, the Persians withdrew, leaving the Greeks in control of the sea. There would be no landward invasion now.

A year later, inspired by the immortal sacrifice of the few, a united Greek force stiffened by yet more Spartan hoplites finally defeated the Persian Army at the Battle of Plataea and tossed Xerxes out of mainland Greece for ever.